Giant compound eyes, half a billion years ago?

We have already reported on the intriguing extinct giant invertebrate predator called Anomalocaris.1 This was a bit like a huge shrimp about 1-metre (3-foot) long (and it could grow to twice that), with spiked arms and a donut-shaped mouth full of tooth-like serrations. The previous report showed that it upset the prevailing evolutionary ‘date’ for this creature, and also noted how it was amazing that such a soft-bodied creature—lacking even a hard exoskeleton—could fossilize at all. Darwin himself wrote that “No organism wholly soft can be preserved,”2 because of his belief in exclusively slow-and-gradual processes, and his rejection of the Genesis Flood.

Now we see how well it was fossilized. A specimen from Emu Bay Shale in South Australia, ‘dated’ at about 515 million years old, was found to have compound eyes on stalks. Each eye was about 2–3 cm (about an inch) across, and had about 16,000 hexagonal facets, compared to a house fly that has only 3,000. (Only dragonflies have more, about 28,000. Evolutionists consider them to be ‘primitive’ flying insects, although human engineers are modelling flapping micro air vehicles on them!3)

This means there is no evidence that the eye evolved at all.

The researchers inferred that the Anomalocaris must have had acute vision, but this posed problems for their evolutionary dogma. One report explained that the team leader, Dr John Paterson of the University of New England, said that:

“ … there was no evidence for eyes in organisms that lived before the Cambrian Explosion—a rapid increase in the diversity of life that began about 540 million years ago. The latest find showed sophisticated vision had evolved very rapidly. It came with a bang, in a geological blink of an eye.”4

Actually, this means there is no evidence that the eye evolved at all. I.e. it seems that the eyes appeared abruptly and fully formed. And evolutionists can’t appeal to long ages to help, since they appeared so suddenly. Indeed, the “Cambrian explosion” in general, with abrupt appearance of all the major groups, including vertebrates, has been a huge problem for evolution ever since Darwin.5 So have compound eyes in general; according to earlier research on other creatures:

“These results illustrate exactly why arthropod compound eye evolution has remained controversial, because one of two seemingly very unlikely evolutionary histories must be true. Either compound eyes with detailed similarities evolved multiple times in different arthropod groups or compound eyes have been lost in a seemingly inordinate number of arthropod lineages.”6

No, there is a better explanation: “The hearing ear and the seeing eye, the Lord has made them both”—Proverbs 20:12.

Oakley, T. and Cunningham, C., Molecular phylogenetic evidence for the independent evolutionary origin of an arthropod compound eye, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA99(3):1426–1430, 5 February 2002. Return to text.

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Readers’ comments

Brian J.,United States, 28 December 2013

The mysterious ‘Cambrian explosion’ is really only a mystery to those that deny the great flood. Finding organisms such as trilobites and Anomalocaris with already formed complex eyes fits perfectly with the Biblical model.

In Genesis 7:11 (NIV) it states “on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth.” If this were true then tons of mud and sediment would have been layered along the oceans floor and guess which organisms would have been buried first. Maybe those that lived on the bottom of the ocean? Just a thought.

The Anomalocaris, trilobites, and other Precambrian and Cambrian organisms didn’t ‘evolve’ before everything else. They were just victims of their circumstance. God created these organisms just as we find them. With complex eyes, mouths, stomachs, some already with exoskeletons and so forth. There was a Flood. These organisms were buried first and that’s why we find them in the lowest rock layers. It has nothing to do with them ‘evolving rapidly’ for a short period of time as the evolutionists would try to convince us. They deny the obvious and that’s why the Cambrian explosion is such a great mystery to them. Plants don’t ‘evolve’ complex eyes overnight. They don't do it 10-20my and they certainly can't be claimed to do it with absolutely zero transitionals or intermediates to show for it.

I don’t have a PhD in Biology but a little common sense goes a long way. God created these organisms fully formed, there was a flood that gasp buried those organisms that live on the ocean floor first and that’s why they appear in the lowest rock layers. This Biblical scenario fits the evidence perfectly.

Jackie B.,United States, 1 January 2014

First of all billions of years ago there was no earth to measure from!

Cg A.,United States, 4 January 2014

They call God’s account of creation a fairy tale, yet every few minutes, another ‘unexplainable’ or ‘controversial’ bit of evidence continues to reveal the lack of wisdom, and the contradictory errors of their man-made fairy tale.

Evolution never happened and I see no reason it should continue to be taught in our schools. On the other hand, the Word of God never fails to explain any of the evidence. Try God, Trust God, Believe God, and you will finally begin to see the truth about Creation.